China will often come into countries like this and present what looks like the sort of commercial support they really need. In the case of Palau, for example, China says it's going to help them build up their tourism sector. Then once it's got them, it then uses that economic leverage to, in the case of Palau, literally crash the economy. It pulled out all the tourists at once, because Palau is a country that recognizes Taiwan. China said that unless they de-recognize Taiwan or recognize China, the tourists aren't coming back, but that was after it had built up the economic dependency.
At the same time, there was major Chinese organized crime operating in Palau. This is a country of less than 20,000 people, and there were triad operators like Broken Tooth operating there. The reason is that as the money comes in, you have this commercial face with a strategic component to it, but the third element of the braid is always corruption. There's always a corruption element, and it's sometimes put on steroids by Chinese organized crime. That is a weak point for the Chinese.
If you take away the corruption, their investments look a lot less attractive. The obviousness of the strategic element is there.
Very quickly, just to get this on the record, we know the 2017 National Intelligence Law requires all Chinese individuals and organizations to support Chinese intelligence efforts, as you've said yourself. This is the sort of thing that we need to incorporate into the assessment of any Chinese engagement in the region. What should we do? We should put in place extremely strong domestic Canadian FARA regulations to begin with, and make sure we're not living in a glass house while we're throwing stones.